Poll procedures still worry voters

Oct. 4, 2012

Written by

Michael Cass

The Tennessean

Davidson County’s election process will continue to have a public relations problem even if technology that went awry in August is permanently fixed, Democratic state lawmakers who represent Nashville said Wednesday.

“I think the public is still very much concerned,” said Rep. Brenda Gilmore. “They’re going to have to do a lot to restore confidence.”

Gilmore and three other House Democrats met with Davidson County Election Administrator Albert Tieche and a bipartisan contingent of the county’s election commissioners to talk about problems that caused some Democratic voters to receive Republican ballots in the Aug. 2 primary election. The vendor who sold the “electronic poll books” to the commission programmed them as if Tennessee were a closed-primary state, where voters generally must be registered members of a party to vote in its primary.

The machines were defaulting to the GOP ballot if poll workers hit the “print” button before selecting either the Republican or the Democratic primary. They’ve since been reprogrammed so poll workers can’t press “print” until they’ve selected a primary, officials said.

Tieche, a Republican, defended the use of the technology at 60 of 160 precincts, calling it “faster, better, cheaper.” He said finding young poll workers is a bigger problem than the equipment itself.

“I need some younger people,” he said. “Our average age is over 70. Yesterday I had to have a talk with a poll official who is 91, and she has done this for 30 years, and she can no longer hear, and she can no longer see and she can no longer walk.”

Lynn Greer, the commission’s Republican chairman, said some poll workers have a “comprehension problem” even after being trained. He said an official at the precinct that had the most problems on Aug. 2 had been trained three times.

“We’ve got a video for the training for these machines, and it’s pretty explicit,” he said. “We’ve got a comprehension problem more than we’ve got a training problem. And that doesn’t mean our training can’t be improved.”

Gilmore said the system has to get better to make all voters feel comfortable.

“The public is a little bit suspicious and thinks that voters deliberately were given Republican ballots,” she told Tieche and Greer. “And I have to be honest, I thought that myself when I first heard that. We can’t have another debacle like we had last time.”

Greer said the commission has decided not to use the electronic poll books in November, even though all voters will receive a general election ballot.

Goodlettsville had problems

In a phone interview a few hours after the meeting, Tieche confirmed that absentee ballots for the Goodlettsville city election contained several errors. One candidate’s name was misspelled, and two candidates were listed by names other than the ones they put on their qualifying petitions.

Tieche said the election commission staff discovered the problem Monday, a few days after the absentee ballots went out, while proofreading the ballot other voters will receive before early voting starts.

Just 16 absentee ballots were sent, and four voters have already returned them and the other 12 have been recalled, Tieche said. He said he was still looking into whether the voters who returned their ballots can vote again.

Ballots for early voting — which starts Oct. 17 — and Election Day on Nov. 6 have not been prepared yet, Tieche said.

In a letter this week to Mark Goins, the state elections coordinator, attorney George Barrett cited the electronic poll book problems and Tieche’s failure to allow early voting on a Saturday before the presidential preference primaries in March — a mistake that drew a reprimand from the State Election Commission. Barrett, a Democrat who is suing the state over its voter identification law, asked Goins to investigate the Davidson County Election Commission’s operations to determine if it is “competent to conduct” the general election.